That last one hurt. Hopefully, he didn’t crack one of my ribs. I rolled on my back next to a large oak and noticed the sunlight streaming through the forest behind the morons looming over me.

Clinton laughed when he saw my nose bleeding, and the others, Jim and Scutter, looked on nervously. The back of Scutter’s mullet glowed in the light and highlighted him like a backwoods messiah.

“I guess you know after this that you shouldn’t get any ideas about going after Renee or dropping by for any tutoring seasons or whatever with her ever again,” said Clinton.

“What the hell were you guys meeting so early for? What was it, a quarter to seven in the morning?”

That’s funny. He ambushed me and beat me up and doesn’t know why I was there. This is going to hurt his ego.

“I’m not her tutor, you idiot. Renee’s smart. She doesn’t have to walk down to the basement where your classes are held. And besides, she’s two years older. She should be tutoring me . . . and I guess, in a way, she was.”

“I didn’t meet her there in the morning. I’ve been seeing her for a few weeks, and since her parents are out of town, we got to drink beer and watch Predator on her parent’s projection screen.”

“She got up early to make me French toast, and I left to help my Mom at the flea market. That’s when I guess butt breath here was jogging by the house and saw me.”

“Then, he reported it to you, and even though you went out with Renee once and struck out, you seem a little possessive. So, you decided to get the hillbilly stooges here to ambush me on the way  . . .”

Clinton charged at me again but only got one kick in the back of my thigh before the Clampets grabbed him and held him back.

“Cool it, dude. His parents can sue you if you mess him up,” said Scutter. He and Jim pulled him back toward the walking path.

“Stay away from her, or I won’t be as nice next time,” said Clinton.

Magicicada septendecim Is Coming

Poor guy. Clinton’s been obsessed with Renee since she gave him the Heimlich in the cafeteria. He was choking on a hard-boiled egg when attempting to beat Cool Hand Luke’s record. He asked her to dinner to repay her, and she accepted out of pity, I guess.

Clinton can’t accept or doesn’t realize that even his friends can’t stand him most of the time, but his plan worked. He and the goons got me pretty good.

My head and face are killing me; I’ll have to wait a minute before I get up. I hope they’re not too many people in the garden when I get there.

Even though she has a big garden in our backyard, my mom volunteers at the community garden on East Washington Avenue. She has since 1975—when it was “cool” to share vegetables and puny fruits with the neighborhood community.

The Washington Garden is on the way to my house when I take the forest trail, and I told her I would water her tomatoes and sesame plants. I’m not fond of tomatoes, but I love her sesame cookies.

I heard a scratching sound behind me and turned to see a cicada, still in its shell, crawling across the base of the oak’s trunk. I don’t know if they’re uglier in their shells or when they hatch into flying noisy assholes.

An alien brood made up of thousands of red eyes, vibrating tymbals, and clicking wings is on the way, and we’re supposed to have a shit-ton this year.

Anyone living on the edge of Wainscoting Forest will get a biblical wave of the 17-year brood, and Clinton lives in Dale Pines. His neighborhood will see a lot more of them than mine. Maybe I can get back at him that way.

That ape-jawed, crew-cut freak loves the president, even though ‘ol Ronny is out of it now. There was a rumor that Clinton’s mom, who had rushed back home to get her bingo dabber, caught him groaning with his hand under his Star Wars blanket while he was staring at a framed photo of a smiling Reagan

on his bedside table. I don’t know if that’s true, but he’s the only guy I know who carries a picture of the president in his wallet.

It should be any day now that the swarm will rain down on Shellinkank, and my uncle will know when and may be able to help me with the plan percolating in my brain.

Kerouac B. Webster—my grandparents were Beatniks, and everyone calls him “Ackby”—was excited about the brood because he’s an entomologist specializing in periodical cicadas.

Acky is a professor at Shellinkank Tech, and he said he’ll be staying up all night for the next six weeks, estimating swarm counts, taking photos, and taking dead and living cicadas back to the lab at his house. Luckily, my aunt is a biologist, and she’s pretty supportive and tolerant of his brood X fever.

Ackby’s Lab and the Pheromone

I like visiting Ackby and checking out the weird insects and equipment in his lab. He and my dad are only three years apart but alike in several ways.

They have a strange sense of humor that sometimes drives their wives crazy, but Ackby is more of a goof than my dad. He’ll appreciate what I want to do, and hopefully, he won’t tell my dad until I’m finished.

I walked past his garage on the stone path that led to the backyard lab and was greeted by artwork that could’ve only come from my uncle. A large, petrified branch planted firmly in the ground next to the holly bushes near the lab’s entrance held a cicada as big as a Cocker Spaniel.

When I got close to it, the tymbals fluttered, and a speaker in its head blasted me with the cicada call. I jumped back. How’d he get it to do that?

It must be motion-activated, but I don’t see the sensor. He should keep that thing around for Halloween, but it would probably scare the hell out of the little ones.  I stopped for a second before opening the door and put my ear to it.

I could hear a guitar twanging through the door. Sounds like Kinky Friedman; he was also into the oddballs. Ackby was bent over his examination table and turned his head, with his magnification glasses making him look like a mad scientist.

“What’s happening, my second favorite nephew?” he asked. He flipped the lenses back on his head and stood up to shake my hand.

“I have a few questions about the brood,” I said.

His face brightened, and he said, “You’ve come to the right hombre, Fred. Now, what’s on your mind?”

“I was curious about how the cicadas flock to certain places. I know they use trees to mate and lay eggs, but do pheromones attract them? And do you have any cicada pheromones here in your lab?

He stared at me; his grin remained, but his eyebrows sank to their “what the hell” position. “If I were to tell you, would you tell me why you want to know?”

“Ackby, of course. It’s for revenge. And love, I guess, but mostly for revenge.” I said.

“Three guys jumped me in the woods on the way home. Jim and Scutter held me against the tree while Clinton, “the dim” Telmers, beat the hell out of me. I don’t care about his buddies, but I’d like to get Clinton back. I think getting frightened of something would do him good.”

Ackby smiled and started to laugh, which I wasn’t expecting. He got up, walked over to the massive, refrigerated cabinet with specimen drawers, and fiddled around until he pulled out a small vial.

“Of course, if I help, you can’t tell anyone I assisted. Not your parents or your friends! I could lose my job here or at least lose tenure. What did you do to him anyway?

“I spent the night with a girl he’s obsessed with, and his friend saw me leaving her house. Don’t mention it to your brother, please.”

“Hmm. Well, I’ve been in your position before. Instead of cicadas, it was roaches. After getting beat up by a hockey player in college, I encouraged the Blatta orientalis to follow him around.”

“I won’t go into why, but if you want a less terrifying but more grotesque alternative, a dead fish does wonders for revenge,” he said with a smile.

“Regardless, I have the solution in a small bottle, but when you’re ready to use it, replace the cap with this little spray nozzle. It will only be potent for about 6 hours, so you’ll have to employ your sabotage at the right moment.”

“If you screw up and wait too long, you’ll get swarmed as you apply the pheromone. It has to be before dusk, or you’ll become a giant communal vibrating bed populated by copulating cicadas.”  

“It would be easier if you had a few friends to help, but the fewer people, the better. Everyone has a friend who can’t keep a secret. Now, here’s what you do.”

Revenge Preparations

My only accomplice was Hermey. We’d been friends since the second grade, and he agreed to bump into Clinton in the hallway after 5th period while I spritzed his back with the solution. He got pushed by Clinton and threatened, but it all worked out.

Unless it was raining, he always left the top down on his MG when he brought it to school. At the end of sixth period, I got permission to rush to the bathroom with my hand on my stomach.

I ran out to the parking lot to coat his car with the pheromone but didn’t see it and decided to run home.

On the way, I snuck over to his house and saw the MG in the driveway. I used about half the bottle on his car and the other half on his bedroom window. His parents were still at work, and I don’t think any of his neighbors saw me.

Run Like the Wind, Clinton

According to third-party sources, my timing worked out pretty well. After debate club, Clinton took the same path home through the woods but stopped by the creek to smoke a Winston.

He heard someone approaching and saw Clara and Clem smiling and walking toward him. They had been best friends since they were infants and are next-door neighbors.

Both have black hair and clothes and are into makeup effects. Some of their bloody eye photos were in last month’s Fangoria.

“Got a couple more of those, Reagan junior,” asked Clara.

He would turn them down, but he secretly liked them, as he did most of the girls in his school, so he gave them the cigarettes and pondered how a romantic night with them would play out.

“So, what brings you out here? You have a ritual to perform or something?”

Clem laughed and said, “Yeah, we wanted to sacrifice a virgin before dusk. We’re having a little trouble cause, you know, not many virgins at our school, but when we saw you, I said, hey, we’re in luck. Gomer over there has never had his wiener warmed. Much less touched!”

“Very funny, Clementine, but ask around . . . Ahhh!” shrieked Clinton as he brushed two cicadas off his right shoulder.  The setting sun was cutting through the dense woods around them, and one of the rays seemed to spotlight Clinton.

A “zombified” male landed on his head, dropped a spore, and buzzed away before he swatted it off.

“Wow, man. They really dig you. I heard cicadas are attracted to weirdos with a lot of pent-up sexual frustration. They sense your inadequacy,” said Clara.

Her smile disappeared as she looked around the woods and sensed the mood shifting. The once-quiet forest was rumbling, and the not-so-distant buzz echoed around them.  The brood was nearby, calling for females.

“We’ll see you, Clint, said Clem.

“Yeah, don’t violate any natural laws—they’re living things, for Christ’s sake,” said Clara with a grin as she grabbed Clem’s arm and rushed up the path toward the school.

“Ok, take my smokes and just leave me here. I see how it is. Don’t worry, I’m not afraid of a few locusts.”

From the top of the hill, Clem yelled, “They’re cicadas, Gomer, not locusts.” The girls ran up the path out of sight as Clinton walked casually in the opposite direction while looking around at the trees.

The area around him darkened as the wind calmed. It smells different right before a storm, but usually, the storm aroma isn’t bitter. The ozone wasn’t there, but an earthy musk saturated the forest.

As he walked quickly down the path, the noise got louder. The chattering, fluttering, white noise assaulted his eardrums and traveled deeper until it rattled his brain.

It was everywhere. He was breathing the horrible sound and tasting it. Clinton felt something wet hit the back of his neck and looked up at the black mass landing on the trees. He picked up the pace but was glad they seemed focused on the oaks rather than him.

That changed in a few seconds when they detected the scent, detached from the trees, and flew toward him.

Several landed on his head, face, and shoulders. “Ahhh. . . fuckin’ locusts,” he shrieked as he moved his hands around, knocking and smashing them off.

He could hear them buzzing all around him, but he ran as fast as he could toward the end of the path that led to his street.

Clinton had to get to his car and escape the woods. After pulling one out of his right ear, he rushed to his car and looked around to ensure they weren’t following him.

He grabbed the top of the door with his hands and jumped into the seat but smashed his knee on the gearshift. “Damn,” he said as he grabbed his knee. The pain throbbed and distracted him for a few seconds before the noise returned.

The cicadas dive-bombed his car and honed in on the pheromone, and the ones buzzing in the trees next to his house dropped down to join them.

He fumbled with his keys and dropped them on the floor as they covered his windshield and explored his body. Some crawled down his back under his Polo while others buzzed around in his armpits.

Clinton shook and yelled, pushed back against the seat to smash the bugs on his back, and slammed on the horn. Only a few flew away temporarily, but more came and crowded onto the living mass growing on the automobile. The noise was too much for him.

He probably didn’t know until then that the brood can get as loud as a low-flying plane or a relative from New Jersey.

The frisky bugs kept coming and piling on Clinton until his entire body was carpeted. He stopped fighting as hard and laid still for a few minutes and whimpered. Can they kill me? he thought.

More just keep coming. Has anyone been suffocated from locusts before? They’re not biting, but they’re scratching. Their little fucking legs are scratching at my eyes.

Digging around in my ears. . . dropping something wet near my eyes. What the. . .are they shitting in my eyebrows?

Finally, motivated by the cicadas scratching around in his nostrils, he leaned against the door and opened it, stumbling onto the concrete. He thought about putting the top up and heading out, but too many were in the car already, so he ran to his house.

He ripped off his shirt, knocked them off his legs, and clawed at his face and neck. His right eye was swollen from where he smashed one of their thoraxes into his eyeball. After making it to his front door and unlocking it, he slammed it shut.

He ran to his room and went for his cordless phone but stopped when he saw a cicada crawling on the top of the golden frame of his Reagan photo.

“How’d you get in here, you bastard?” He ran toward the frame and pulled back his right hand to smash it, but it flew off and landed near his window.

“You can’t do that to Ronald Wilson Reagan!” Clinton grabbed his Reagan biography (hardback edition) and crept toward the cicada on the wall. He heard buzzing and clicking outside and pulled back the curtains.

The shifting, noisy mass was huddled on the glass of the top pane and the screen on the bottom. Unfortunately for Clint, I had made a slit in the screen earlier, which was widening from the weight of the throbbing bugs.

The invaders piled in and flew toward Clinton. He swatted them and yelled like a bloodthirsty warrior, but when more entered and swarmed his face and chest, he dropped his book and tripped over a 10-pound dumbbell while backing up.

He tumbled into the dresser before crashing on the floor.

When his parents found him, he was still knocked out on the floor with buzzing cicadas enjoying their time in their temporary brothel. His mom is terrified of insects and had to stay outside the room as his dad dragged Clinton out.

They took their traumatized son to the hospital, and although he had a concussion, he wasn’t too damaged, physically at least.

Before they reached the hospital’s main entrance, the brood detached from the trees near the west side and swooped in to greet Clinton and make love to his hair.